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He is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to Him. Amen. You may be seated. In the name of Jesus, amen.
Dear saints, Jesus is in the temple on this Holy Tuesday. This text from Luke chapter 20 is from the last public teaching of Jesus, the Tuesday before His death on Friday. And He’s there in the temple, and He’s being assaulted from every side by the Sadducees and by the Pharisees and by the scribes who hate Him and want to find Him guilty of breaking some sort of law, either the Roman law or the Jewish law, so that they could throw Him in prison and put Him to death.
And we see in the text that the Sadducees are coming at Jesus. At least that’s the first assault that we hear. Now, the Sadducees we remember, and Luke tells us, it’s really nice, the Sadducees didn’t believe in the resurrection, and this wasn’t the only thing. The Sadducees and the Pharisees were at odds with each other and had been at odds with each other for centuries. Probably we would think of the Pharisees as the more conservative of the two, but I don’t think the liberal-conservative distinction quite fits that well.
The Sadducees were—they were the temple party. They believed in the books of Moses, so they had the first five books of the Bible, but they didn’t believe that the prophets were authoritative, so if they were to argue, the Pharisees would argue from Isaiah or from Zechariah, then the Sadducees wouldn’t take it as authoritative. The Sadducees were all about the sacrifices in the temple, while the Pharisees were all about serving God through a life of good works. But the Sadducees also did not believe in the angels. They thought…
I’m not sure what they thought, they just didn’t believe in them, and also this here, this major distinction, they didn’t believe in the resurrection. And so they’re going to bring a question to Jesus that they had used to stump the Pharisees for generations.
Now, the important thing for us to recognize is that what they are going to present to Jesus is not so much of an argument. It’s more of an… it’s more of an opportunity to ridicule Jesus. They’re going to bring this story about this woman who was married to five different men. They’re going to bring this story to Jesus, like they had brought to the Pharisees and other people in the past, and they’re going to say, look at how ridiculous your doctrine is, and look at how ridiculous you are for believing it.
Now I want to maybe pause there for a little aside, because I think it’s important for us to recognize that this is still how the devil argues today. I think sometimes, sometimes the world and the devil present us with arguments for reasons that we shouldn’t believe the things that we believe, but not most of the time. Most of the time, the devil comes to us, and he just mocks us. He ridicules us. He wants us not to feel wrong, but to feel stupid for believing what we believe and confessing what we confess.
I’ll just give—I’ll give you an example. I noticed a couple of years ago there was an argument going back and forth between pastors in our church about the six days of creation, and we confess from the Scriptures that God created the world in six days, I mean that’s as plain as it could be, but there were pastors who were uneasy with that, who wanted to open it up more, who wanted to say things beyond this or say, well, we can’t be a hundred percent sure.
And I was trying to figure out why, what arguments had been presented to them that they would want to step back off of the clear Word of God. And I couldn’t find one. It wasn’t an argument. And this is what I found out, it wasn’t an argument that was brought to them, like some sort of scientific proof of creation not being in six days or some sort of philosophical presentation or some sort of assertion that put this together, which meant we should understand the Bible differently. No, it wasn’t any of that at all. It was mostly just embarrassment.
They thought that if we just confess simply that the Lord made the world in six days that the world will laugh at us. It will understand us to be foolish or small-minded or unscientific or whatever. The world will just sneer at us and jeer at us. You see, it wasn’t an argument. I think I had the name for this, the devil’s snicker strategy. It’s not like the devil comes along and argues against it. He just sits there, and when you say something, he kind of snickers or laughs or acts like we should be ashamed of ourselves.
This is what David prays about in Psalm 4. Remember Psalm 4, David says, how long will you turn my glory into shame? So the devil tries to take those things which are the most glorious to us, those things which are our most treasured things, the Word of God, the kindness of Jesus, the fact that we are baptized, the gift of the Scriptures that are true and give us a true accounting both of God and of history and everything else it talks about. The devil tries to take those things which we treasure and which we glory and make us embarrassed about them.
He doesn’t argue, he just snickers. You still believe that? In the year 2019, you still believe that? And he laughs.
Now that’s what they were trying to do with Jesus, so that the people around Jesus would laugh at his ideas and at his doctrine about the resurrection. We should, just again to kind of finish up the aside, we should not be afraid of that strategy. We should not be afraid of being laughed at by the devil. In fact, we should be comforted when the devil and the world laughs at us that we’re on to something good. That the Lord has given us his gifts and his kindness and his word and his clarity for our wisdom and our comfort.
Okay, so that the crowd would laugh at Jesus, they bring this ridiculous story. There was a law in Deuteronomy chapter 25 that said that if a man was married and he died and he didn’t have any children, that the brother had the responsibility of taking care of the widow. There’s a lot of questions about how that should actually be worked out, but the Sadducees had worked that out in this ridiculous story of a man who was married, and he died, and so his wife married his brother, and he died, and she married his brother, and he died, and on down the road, brother four died, brother five died, none of them had children.
You wonder about brother six if he was really excited about this wedding, or brother seven who’s probably planning his funeral, along with his vows, you know. It’s a ridiculous kind of story, but that’s the point, because you were supposed to say, well, now whose wife will she be in the resurrection? And that was supposed to show the foolishness of the doctrine of the resurrection, and everyone was supposed to laugh.
But Jesus gives them an answer, and it’s really quite beautiful. Now, we have this text, I’m convinced, on today, the third last Sunday of the church year because we want to start focusing our attention on the end, the end of time, on the last day when Jesus will come back as promised and raise the dead and judge all people, and we Christians who were born again through the Word of God will enter with Him into the resurrection of the righteous. And so the Scripture wants to focus our attention on the resurrection, which is good because I think this doctrine is often neglected.
In fact, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that most people think of heaven as eternal life and not as the resurrection. We know from the Scriptures that to die means to have our soul and our body torn apart, unnaturally rendered from one another, but this is only a temporary arrangement. That’s not what eternal life is like. You are not eternally without a body. I one time saw a picture of a gravestone. I don’t know if it was real or not. I hope it was. There’s a picture of a gravestone and on it, it said this is only a temporary setback.
Now that’s true. It’s true. The theologians have called this time when your body and your soul are separated from one another, they call it the intermediate state as if to emphasize that it doesn’t last forever. Your body and your soul will only be apart from one another for a little while until the last day, and then Jesus will come and He will stand on the earth and He will call you forth from the grave and your bodies and your soul, your body and your soul will be back together forever. That’s what we confess when we say, I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.
Now, this raises a lot of questions. In fact, I think I have one, two, three, four questions that almost always come up when we start talking about the resurrection. The first question is this, Pastor, is it really this body that’s going to be raised? Yes. I mean, the thing to answer all of these questions for us to meditate on is Jesus. He, after all, is the firstfruits of the resurrection, and while a lot of other people in the Bible were given their life back, they were not resurrected. They were resuscitated. They had to die again. Jesus is the first and only one to be resurrected, to be brought into that eternal life.
And so we think about Jesus and we ask, was His body the same body that was raised? And the answer was yes. God the Father did not give Jesus a new body. If He would have, then the old crucified body would still be in the grave. No, this body is the body that’s raised. Which leads to the next question, which is, Pastor, what if I don’t want this body? Can I trade it in? Upgrade? Now we want to look at the words of Jesus because the resurrection is a transformation. Your body that you have now is the body that will be raised, but it will be raised glorious.
Listen to what Jesus says, the sons of this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are considered worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage, for they cannot die anymore because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection. Your resurrected body will be beyond the reach of death. It will die no more, which means that it’s beyond the reach of sickness, it’s beyond the reach of sin, it’s beyond the reach of corruption.
All of this is taken away. Your body will be raised perfect. Listen to how St. Paul talks about it, and he compares the death and resurrection to the planting of a seed in the ground and to its sprouting and blooming in glory. 1 Corinthians 15.42 says, so it is with the resurrection of the dead, what is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable, what’s sown in dishonor is raised in glory, it’s sown in weakness, it’s raised in power, it’s sown a natural body, it’s raised a spiritual body.
So that your body will be raised, but it will be a spiritual body, untouched and untouchable to all sickness, to all corruption, to all sin, to all temptation, even to all sinful desires. Can you imagine this? Not only in the resurrection will you not be able to sin, but you will not even want to sin. You will not be able to want to sin. Some people say, well, Pastor, how do I know that when I get into the resurrection that we’ll all be there having a great time in the face of Jesus, and then I’ll be tempted to take the fruit and I’ll mess it all up again?
Well, remember in the garden the Lord said, if you eat it you will die, but in the resurrection, Jesus says, there is no more death. In the garden, death was a possibility, but in the resurrection, it is not, and neither is anything that goes along with death. Sin, temptation, the devil, all of them are gone. Well, the next question, which I get a lot, actually, is this, how old will we be in the resurrection? I think that’s a subset of the body, if I have to get this body back, can I get it back at a younger age? Or especially as we think of those who have died at a very young age, and we wonder about this.
Now, the question, I think the answer to the question, the only answer we have from the Scripture is this, how old was Jesus when He was resurrected? The same age He was when He died. That’s as close as we can get to an answer. Now I have some speculation and I want to kind of want to stand out here outside of the pulpit to speculate. But just pretend like I’m standing over here. Okay? Because this is my own thoughts. But I think that one of the reasons why getting older in this life is so tough is because every day older is a little bit closer to dying.
Every day that we age is a little bit closer to the grave, and we feel it even in our own bodies a little bit more forgetful, a little bit slower, a little bit more achy. We age because we are aging towards the grave, but in the resurrection, every day is not getting closer to death, but rather every day is getting farther from death. So it doesn’t matter our age in the resurrection because every day is a little bit further and further into the glory that the Lord Jesus has for us, a little bit better and better, they’re a little bit farther and farther from death, but again, that’s my own speculation.
Here’s the last question, which is also very common, Pastor, are we going to know one another in the resurrection? Are we going to recognize each other? You know, I don’t know where this question comes from. I just wonder what it is in our imaginations of the resurrection that makes us ask this question. I think maybe because Jesus was hard to recognize after He was raised from the dead, He walked all the way to Emmaus on the road with His disciples before they recognized Him, but the text tells us that that was because He hid Himself from them. Mary thought that Jesus was the gardener, but that was in the darkness of that early morning, and as soon as Jesus spoke, she recognized who it was.
I think the answer to this question, will we know one another in the resurrection, is finally. Finally we’ll know one another. Finally, we’ll recognize one another. Finally we’ll be able to see each other for who we really are. The language that the Scripture uses for this is that we will know and we will be fully known by God and by one another. Now, Jesus does say, in this particular text that we’re looking at, that we will be like the angels, that we will no longer be married or given in marriage, there’s going to be no weddings celebrated in the resurrection, and that’s at least because in the resurrection there will be no more babies, and that families will be very different, or of a very different sort than we’re used to seeing them now.
But this in no way indicates that the bonds of love that we have formed here in this life, and especially those bonds of love formed in the Lord’s name, would be broken, but rather we have the expectation that our love for one another will be fully deepened, that all the barriers of sin and selfishness and temptation and trouble that stand between sinners, that these are all gone, and that finally not only will we rejoice fully in our Lord Jesus, but that we will rejoice in each other and in this love and service that the Lord gives us to have for one another.
So we are settled in by the Scriptures to this great hope of the resurrection, that Jesus will, on the last day, transform our lowly bodies to be like His glorious body, and that’s the answer to the last question. Well, Pastor, what happens if my body is utterly destroyed? What happens if my body is burned? What happens if my body falls overboard and is eaten by a shark, which is then eaten by a whale, which is then died and cooked and eaten by people? What happens to my body then, Pastor?
Well, Paul tells us that the power with which Jesus holds all things together, he will use to reconstitute our earthly bodies, to be like his glorious body, so that you will be able to stand before the Lord and see him face to face. Remember what happened when Moses saw the glory of God in the burning bush? The text says He hid His face because He was afraid to look upon the Lord because no one can see the face of the Lord and live, and yet in the resurrection you will be able to look upon the Lord face to face to be able to handle His glory and to rejoice in His magnificence.
And this Jesus proves from the Scriptures. Scriptures, verse 37 in Luke 20, but that the dead are raised even Moses showed in the passage about the burning bush, where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Now He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living, for all live to Him.
Now there is a lot going on in these words of Jesus, and it is a bit of a riddle, but just to cover it briefly, we remember that when God told Moses his name from the burning bush, he said, I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He did not say, I was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but rather, I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So, He is the God of the living, that is, all those who are His will live. Some of the old Greek philosophers had the idea that the soul was immortal.
That’s the idea that all of us have a part of us that’s indestructible. Now, this is not the biblical teaching of the resurrection. We do not live forever because of something in us, but because God is our God, because Jesus is our Savior, and because He is risen from the dead. He is the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep, and we are the harvest to follow. Well, we are those who will be called out of the grave to live forever.
Now the Sadducees, after Jesus answered them, almost couldn’t help themselves, even though they hated Jesus, it’s almost like it slips out of their mouth, they say, wow, you answered that question good. But still, they left angry. They left plotting. They left hoping to destroy Jesus. And why? Because their hopes were in this life. Their hopes were in this world. They were busy building a kingdom for themselves in this life, but not so for us. Our hope belongs in the resurrection. Our hope belongs in the life to come. Our hope is in Jesus whose kingdom is not of this world and so we leave these words of Jesus not with frustration like the Pharisees or disappointment like the Sadducees but we leave these words of Jesus with life and hope knowing that these promises and that this promise of resurrection is for us.
Dear Saints, one day soon Jesus will return and he will stand on the earth. He will call your name and all who are dead will come forth and those who are alive will be transformed and we will stand before Lord Jesus, body and soul forever perfected, and enter with Him into life eternal. This is our confidence and our hope. May God grant it for Christ’s sake, amen.
And the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all, amen.